co·in·ci·dence n.
1. The state or fact of occupying the same relative position or area in space.
2. A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language
"Remain alert to the occurrence of coincidence. Appreciate coincidence not as the revelation of some inner meaning, although that may be true, but as something that can enrich the present moment."
Coincidence. What in the Dickens is it? Hey, that's a coincidence right there, as coincidence was a major plot device in the works of Charles Dickens. When it happens, coincidence, it startles you, because it defies the odds. I mean coincidence can be so bizarrely astronomically against the odds that it can leave you reeling, drunkenly scratching your head, because there is absolutely no question that it happens, but what in the Sam Hill does it all mean?
Probably the cutest quotation on "coincidence" was by Albert Einstein (and it has at least the hint of a ring of truth about it):
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Isn't that what it seems like, when coincidence happens? That it was foreordained or at least arranged? Many people outright make this claim, that coincidence is nothing more than recognizing God's plan in action (as we usually don't recognize His hand, or the actions of His hand). Of course that is just an opinion, or maybe better described as a "wild idea."
For the most part, coincidence must be just that, a meaningless occurrence that catches our attention; in our mind we make a connection to something else. The two things are not connected, but we link them in our imagination so that the occurrence is remarkable, if only for a few seconds (and then we forget about it).
It is generally so mild, this surprised attention that we focus, that we forget all about it moments later, and it is almost always comical, this recognition of something special happening, we almost always smile about it. You yell to your wife that you have to run out because you need a stamp, and as you exit your house an elephant escaped from circus stamps on you: WOW! What a coincidence. Here you just said you needed a stamp, and blammo, you get a big stamp. Talk about positive confession and laws of attraction, that big ole genie at work again, luck-blinded and slipshod ever giving what you mistakenly say as opposed to what you desperately need (isn't that something, that the true concept of God, and the Actuality, works in the opposite direction?).
It's a coincidence, nothing more. It seems relevant, but it really aint.
HOWEVER. Sometimes, it is just too weird, too . . . well, COINCIDENTAL to be overlooked, that there just HAS to be meaning in it. I'm not talking about interpreting omens. But when things coincidentally line up in such a way that it seems it must have been prearranged, what can you think? Can I give you a very recent example?
When I tell you this tale, you will think I'm tweaking the facts to make it more interesting, but the truth is, it is as astronomically odds-wise impossible as I present, without the need to tweak or stretch or imbibe my penchant for storytelling.
Two hours before the birth of our new daughter, Genevieve, the new nurse coming on shift assigned to my wife asked me if I knew the gender of our baby, and after I told her that our baby was a girl she inquired as to the name we had picked. When I told her that our new daughter would be named Genevieve, the nurse's eyes bugged out and she instantly displayed a picture she wears around her neck, the picture of her five-year-old daughter. Can you guess the little girl's name?
Genevieve.
Genevieve is a rather old-fashioned name (it was a hit song in 1889) that you do not hear too much of these days (I, in fact, have absolutely never met or known a Genevieve). And now here was the nurse coming on duty to aid in delivering my daughter, and she has a daughter named Genevieve. How probable is that? And the nurse truly bonded with my wife, especially when Genevieve was born sunny-side-up with the aid of forceps and my wife sustained severe damage from the instruments and wouldn't stop bleeding, and developed multiple blood clots requiring surgery; the wonderful nurse, Monica, actually received permission from the head nurse to accompany Carolena to surgery where she never left her side.
Fairly coincidental, wouldn't you say? But that is not the end of it. Hours later, when we were moved to the recovery room where we would spend the next four days, written on a whiteboard was the name of the nurse in charge of Carolena. The name written was "Genny" which is the diminutive of Genevieve, and that is what we were already calling our new baby girl, even when she was our unborn daughter. Baby Genny. And now, just hours after meeting a nurse with a daughter named Genevieve, our first recovery nurse is Genny, also the name of our daughter. And to think that "Genny" is much more uncommon than "Jenny," which is the standard diminutive of Jennifer.
Pretty much those coincidences are astronomically absurd. I mean, seen in a movie, nobody would buy it (YOU probably don't buy it, thinking that I'm making up all this impossible stuff because, um, WHY in the world would anyone make this stuff up?). It just can't happen. It ain't so, Joe. No way. Uh-uh. Can't happen in a rational world. Never can, never will, never would, never should and uh uh, never never never NEVER. Right?
But that is just the beginning of the story. Things get really weird from hereon in.
The next day I called my mother and we talked about the birth, the wounding, the surgery, and how even in this day and age of emergency procedures and life-saving techniques, right in the middle of a modern and gigantic hospital, it is still possible for a mother to die in childbirth, as Carolena had come so close to doing. And my mother reminded me of a fact I hadn't remembered, that was of her childhood friend Hilda. They had never lost touch, in perhaps over 50 years, and Hilda and her husband Chuck had two children, and their son's wife just happened to die in childbirth. I'd forgotten all about that, even though my parents had told me about it a few times. Of course I hadn't seen "Chuckie" in years, not since I was a kid, probably the last time when I was about eight years old.
Is that kind of a coincidence, that two girlhood friends each have sons and one loses his wife in childbirth and the other almost does?
Perhaps. But it is not the Grand Coincidence of them all, the one I've been leading up to.
A few days after Genny's birth I was talking to a good friend of mine that I haven't seen in probably 25 years and I was talking about how close my wife had come to death, and my friend related that her best friend had actually died in childbirth several years before. I had thought that was kind of odd, that here I was talking to someone else with that brush of death in the birthing room, and I was preparing to tell her about my mother's story, about Chuckie's wife who died in childbirth. And that's when she mentioned that her best friend's husband's name was Chuck.
Wait a second, what in the world were the odds of THAT? That her best friend died in childbirth and the husband's name was Chuck? When the son of my mother's best friend's name was also Chuck (or "Chuckie" as I had known him as children).
I mulled that for a few seconds. The implied suggestion was more than a little bit freaking me out. Weird. Eerie, I mean, come on, what's going ON? What can it mean? Does it mean ANYthing? I mean not just the coincidence of NAMES (Chuck and Chuckie), but, I mean, just, um, what if...? Could it be possible? No, that wouldn't be possible that this was the same person, the story I was just about to relate to my friend. She couldn't have beat me to the punch and told me the same story I was about to tell her, could she?
So I rudely interrupted my friend to tell her about Hilda and Chuck's son, whose wife had died in childbirth, and she calmly came back with: "Chuck's parents are named Hilda and Charles!" My good friend, whom I hadn't seen in 25 years, had married and moved to another state where she met and became best friends with the wife of the son of my mother's best friend. It was the same tale. She was telling me the same tale my mother had told me the day before. Her deceased best friend's husband was the son of my mother's lifelong friend.
All the other coincidences leading up to this Grand Coincidence pale in comparison.
I mean, is that even possible?
How small is the world?
Is this a story written by Charles Dickens?
If the first few coincidences had been astronomically absurd, this one dwells somewhere in another universe. It is impossible. Period.
And all these connections, these coincidences, all of them came to light in less than one week, in about five days, in fact.
Coincidence? God remaining anonymous?
" A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged."
Whatever, the truth is out there. I don't know what it is. The truth about coincidences. But it is true. It is the truth.
And the truth is so absurdly impossible it could never be broached on an episode of the X Files, because who'd believe it?
As Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, put it: "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
